When he ran for mayor, he railed against traffic-blocking streetcars, and called for an end to the "war on cars." Most important, he made a divine mission of fighting taxes, which many voters believed funded the preoccupations of down-town special interests.
That some of this worked against the interests of the working poor (those dastardly taxes might have funded better suburban transit) didn't much matter. He appealed to the emotion of hundreds of thousands of Torontonians struggling to get ahead, while the city obtained new powers to tax their vehicles and the sales of their homes (Charlie Gillis, "The meaning of Rob Ford. He defied all the laws of conventional politics but his success was no riddle. He worked hard, and voters understood he'd been bruised by life - just like them", MACLEAN'S MAGAZINE, April 4, 2016).